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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Wasteful New Voting Process is Not Progress

I was dismayed when I voted in the primaries today to discover a new voting process. I imagine this was an attempt to update the process, but this process is certainly not progress.I was completely dismayed when I discovered they took the former paperless process and turned it to a paper-filled process. Now, rather than going to a booth and flipping dials to vote for your candidate, you fill this out on a piece of paper. Then you take the paper to a machine where it’s scanned. All of a sudden the paperless process is gone and voting is needlessly resulting in the unnecessary death of trees. Additionally, the process has become more cumbersome. I now need to fill in a scantron, then scan my paper, whereas previously I just made my selection and waa-laaaa. I was done. I’m all about updating a system, but this is no update to the voter. We need to complete an extra step and the paperless system is no longer. I say Facebook should get in the game of voting. Let us log on to our computers using Facebook or perhaps open ID and make our selections from home. The technology is here, we’d save a pretty penny on all the workers we hire that day and we’d save a lot of trees.

1 comment:

As I understand it, the electronic+paper route is being taken because there were a great number of security holes found in many electronic-only voting systems (one comes to mind in which there was a memory card slot which it turns out could be used to disrupt the software running the machine). Accordingly, they're doing this because they want the vote to be trustworthy (and trusted).

As for online voting, that's not necessarily a bad idea, but I disagree that Facebook is a good platform for it: it's fairly easy to make fraudulent profiles (including impersonating others). Without a better way to verify identities, that would likely lead to massive election fraud.